Microbes of old Early evidence for travel with infectious diseases along the Silk Road: Intestinal parasites from 2000 year-old personal hygiene sticks in a latrine at Xuanquanzhi Relay Station in China — Hui-Yuan Yeh — Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports ($31.50) The Silk Road has often been blamed for the spread of infectious diseases in …

An open access article entitled “Evaluation of disinfection efficiency in pet’s hospital by using chlorine dioxide” was recently published in Sustainable Environment Research. In this study, the authors investigated the efficacy of chlorine dioxide in reducing the concentration of bacteria and fungi in bioaerosols in an animal hospital. Chlorine dioxide is an effective disinfectant commonly …

For the past couple of years, there has been a storm gathering on the horizon of indoor air quality monitoring. Nucleating around crowd-funding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, these devices seem to advect along roughly similar trajectories. The teams working on these projects have created a sort of high pressure system wafting high-quality industrial …

Microbiology of the Built Environment research these recent years have explored how humans are a source of microbes and microbial products indoors. To further study the effect of human occupancy on the biological aerosols of indoor space, our research group at Berkeley decided to move from observation studies to controlled experiments to isolate – and quantify – this …

Several new papers about microbes and the built environment came out or came up in my searches this weekend, so time for another installment. Since one of the papers is about prison workers, you could play Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues while reading this post. Open Access: Coccidioides Exposure and Coccidioidomycosis among Prison Employees, California, United States – …

New “Built Environment” papers that came out in the last couple of days, covering microbes in indoor air, flooded areas in Thailand, and on money bills. Chamber Bioaerosol Study: Outdoor Air and Human Occupants as Sources of Indoor Airborne Microbes – Rachel I. Adams – PLOS ONE ..we used DNA sequencing of filter samples to assess the …

I know I am late to the game here but I am getting more and more fascinated by “chamber” studies in which people are placed in a sealed chamber and then emissions from those people (or from other things in the chamber with the people) are characterized. With ever improving sensors, particle analysis tools, mass-specs …

One of the issues that was raised in the recent Microbiology of the Built Environment conference in Boulder was sampling, specifically what and how is the material collected for subsequent biological analysis. Industrial hygienists and those tackling questions of exposure have devoted a lot of time to developing methods for how to study the indoor …

Registrants for the March AAAS Symposium are recipients today of the following message from Anette Olsen at AAAS. “I’d like to let you know that the videos of each panel is now online, but they currently remain unedited. We anticipate another two weeks before the edited versions are placed online. In the meantime, here is …